Matsushita to offer Blu-ray Disk recorders by July

About this news article

Posted by	Dan Bell
Posted on	11/03/04 05:40
Number of views	495

Text Size Text Size

Matsushita to offer Blu-ray Disk recorders by July

Skullyboy and GristyMcFisty used our news submit to tell us that Matsushita willl be the second behind Sony to offer Blu-Ray recorders, predicing them to be available in July. Matsushita's Blu-ray disk recorders will store 4.5 hours of HD video.

Matsushita showed a prototype of its Blu-ray DVD-RAM recorder on Tuesday (March 9) that uses a two-layer 50 Gbyte disk. The prototype incorporates tuners that cover all digital TV broadcasting in Japan and is also compatible with present DVD-RAM and DVD-R formats. Other details won't be revealed for another several months, the company said.
Matsushita said it intends to introduce the recorder in Japan before the Athens Olympic Games to be staged in August. During the Olympics, viewers often use video recorders more often, said Shuzo Ushimaru, director of corporate marketing of Matsushita.

Etsuji Shuda of Matsushita's Home AV Business Unit said: "we are going to promote [Blu-ray disk] recorders as the high-end product of Diga [Matsushita's brand of DVD-RAM products] series, which can record HD programs,"

Matsushita also plans to manufacture and supply the two-layer Blu-ray disks.

Source: EE Times

Next: Infomedia first from Taiwan to launch DL DVD+R discs

Previous: Plextor announces the PX-712A, 12x DVD±RW recorder *update*

Want to submit your own news? Click here

Posted by cynicalbastard on Thursday 11 March 2004 09:23

nice development, tho I'd hate to see the sticker price

typo edit
[edited by cynicalbastard on 11.03.2004 09:24]

Posted by GristyMcFisty on Thursday 11 March 2004 13:05

Next to useless though not compatible with anything, can't be used in conjunction with a PC. And what's all the -RAM nonsense why don't Panasonic ever learn...no one wants -RAM it limits compatibility and playability...it's a natural born copy protection by the very nature of the format.

However in the future I'm sure Blu-ray andor the competing format will become very popular as HDTV kicks in...until then we watch and wait with great interest and anticipation...what do we all reckon? 5 years time and it'll be realistically priced and start displacing DVD? Maybe it's success will depend on the development and rollout of HDTV?

Posted by Jim Kiler on Thursday 11 March 2004 18:37

Blu Ray will be cool once it is here. I personally like DVD-RAM the best of the recordable formats because of it hard drive like qualities, and would get one with support for it right now if I bought a DVD recorder. Hitachi has the first Digital Video camera to burn to DVD and they use RAM discs.

Posted by cynicalbastard on Thursday 11 March 2004 18:50

fwiw, I like the HD-like qualities of RAM also. It isn't popular right now for various reasons, but there are plans to increase the speed of burning (which should hopefully put demand up and bring the disc prices down...) and I think it deserves to be popular based on its unique qualities.

Post your reaction!